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Dort_Owl [they/them, any]
GamesFor me it's a couple
First is GTA. I played a LOT of Vice City and and San Andreas as a kid, but mostly because everyone else played them at the time and there wasn't really many games quite like it where you could mess around and explore a massive city and find cool vehicles just by exploring. But by the time GTA 4 rolled around other open world games did things just as good and the edgey humor has starting to wear thin on me so I had moved on to things like Elder Scrolls by that time.
Another is Minecraft. Minecraft is the exact kind of game I should be in to, it looks so fun! But I just found the artstyle so damn ugly. It's so rare for me to avoid something for aesthetic reasons, usually low poly art is charming but for some reason Minecrafts style just looks really unappealing to me. This is coming from someone who likes a lot of games people think are ugly.
Lastly are what I'll call "grizzled white guy action games" Uncharted, Red Dead, The Last of Us. They just feel too much like they're trying to be be a blockbuster for for guys that don't want to be made fun of for liking games rather than games. I know that that probably isn't the case, but they just seem too normal to me.
However I respect that these are all good series but they just aren't for me. Are there any game series where this is true for you?
Don't be afraid to say a series you know I like, I won't be offended.
(oldschool)RuneScape, I find the planning out of grinding fascinating but have no desire to commit hours to it myself.
I really tried to like mobas. I put in like 500 hours on Dota 2 and I dunno how many into league, but I don't feel like I ever had fun with them at any point. Really wanted to be into them because I had friends who played them and they have such broad appeal that it seems like an easy way to connect with people.
I'd add dark souls as well, but I really don't understand the appeal.
Battle Royales, I've played a few since that's what friends want to play but I'd never play one of my own volition. It doesn't help that I'm just not good at them & I feel like dead weight on a team of 3
Take apex legends, it's a solid game with really smooth movement/gunplay but it's so damn stressful to keep track of everything that's going on. I much prefer single player RPGs like New Vegas, Shadowrun Returns, Baldur's Gate, etc but obviously they aren't exactly social games
Dwarf fortress is one of the coolest concepts I've ever seen, and I cannot get into it.
I've never met a deck builder game I've liked.
And I've never made it further than like Day 2 of Disco Elysium. It's just so so dense and I need to be in a novel-reading mood to enjoy it properly, and those are far between so I end up forgetting what I did in between runs and restarting.
Same on Disco Elysium. Also it makes me sad
It is a very sad game. It also wouldn't work if it wasn't sad.
The sadness is why people care about Harry.
The sadness is why people care about Revachol.
If Revachol wasn't so bleak, La Revacholiere would just be self indulgence, Cindy the skull writing a hopeful message in fuel oil wouldn't matter, the communists telling you "In the dark times, should the stars also go out" wouldn't hit.
And it wouldn't be so fucking funny for Harry to do the finger guns, try to do a matrix dive, and immediately hit a woman in a wheelchair.
It making me sad isnt a bad thing, just a reason I never finish it
I'd read a disco Elysium book, but I can't get far in the game.
I couldn't enjoy GTA (it really fell off after 2), the Witcher games, or Disco Elysium (I ain't reading all that)
Dark Souls, I play games to have fun but I can understand other people may have different reasons
I understand the appeal of Hades but tbqh I like the broadly similar game "curse of the dead gods" way better.
I like hades, but I will not be completing the same game 30 times with self imposed difficulty sliders.
Fighting games and rts games. I wanna already know how to play them cause they seem fun as hell once you have the hang. I cannot get the hang.
Sorta kinda the soulsborn stuff... a lot of people like em for different reasons and I dont. Whether or not I understand and respect kinda depends. I think most controversially. I dont mind the gameplay, I dont like the aesthetic or storytelling. Make a castlevania game in thst style and id be right there. I just dont like grimdsrk fantasy that I have to work out why I give a shit about what improving in the first place over the course of doing it cause for most of the ds1 which is the one I played in had no idea why I should give a shit about any of this generic dark fantasy crap. I know if you dig deep enough to make a 6 hour podcast then there is stuff but nothing maxe me feel compelled to look into it. Also as a gameplay tjing that is a me thing, im good at hard 2d games and bad at hard 3d games or at least like 2d difficulty more and am less easy to give up. There are a variety of reasons mostly availability of information on the screen that makes 2d feel more fun to be challenged in. I wish I liked them, people that like em sre having lots of fun. But I really dont get it.
Fighting games and rts games. I wanna already know how to play them cause they seem fun as hell once you have the hang. I cannot get the hang.
Old RTS have great single-player modes. I'd start with Warcraft 3 and Red Alert 2 and work backwards in their respective series. They pretty much all (even back the original C&C and Warcraft) have super easy starting missions, and steadily get harder. A lot of the time that's gonna be too hard for a newbie by like the fourth mission, which is why I recommend hopping between games when it happens instead of plowing ahead. But after a loop of a few you'll find that you've gotten better at all of them.
If you want to get into competitive, I don't know. I think AOE2 still has a big enough community to match noobs against noobs (but it's Microsoft so I dunno, I won't touch it). A lot of other games have been whittled down to just people who already know it though.
I don't know anything about fighting games.
I dont want to get into them. I just respect em. I dont play video games much anymore in general.
name any popular JRPG. I just never really could. i probably didnt get past disc 2 of FF7, and i played FFX a decent bit but pretty sure i didnt beat that.
also, pretty much any Zelda not called Wind Waker.
Disc 1 is by far the best part of FFVII anyway. The game opens with you playing as a gang of ecoterrorists who blow up a power plant and literally nothing they do later in the game can live up to it.
trying to be be a blockbuster
The more games try to be movies the more I'm adverse to playing them. I really don't like the Sony stable of modern games. When everything became over the shoulder and mostly open world (the detritus of the 7th gen) Ever chasing realism most of the games look so similar in the environments, it's become rather stale.
Minecraft
Would be one pick that I find too unstructured to enjoy and I don't really engage in any multiplayer.
Fighting games. Zero interest in memorizing combos and using them with millisecond precision.
Slay the Spire and Balatro were two games that people I know have gotten really into but I could never get through. It's something about any type of card game that doesn't jive with my brain.
Also slay the spire's art direction didn't do it for me, and that's basically a necessity in roguelike games.
I never finished Half Life because there were too many "where the fuck do I go/do moments" which might be a skill issue but whatever.
Fallout 2 had that god awful tutorial section that made me quit and I found the story to be a repeat of the first game anyway. Never played the Bethesda fallouts because I already played Skyrim.
Haven't got into any RTS games for a similar reason to card games.
TBH I enjoy most video games by watching people play them since I can't find the time nowadays. Very much born and raised on let's plays.
Any game that I'm bad at. It can be well designed and smooth to play, but if I'm bad at it I'm not going to enjoy it. It sucks being bad at something, especially a leisure activity you paid money for
Pretty much any big AAA game franchise for me. I have friends play them and I just don't get it? Like they look pretty, but they all feel so samey, all got this same kind of third person perspective and it never really feels all that different from each other, whether you're an assassin dude or a cowboy dude or a vampire hunting dude, they all feel so...artificial? Like token RPG elements and vague "exploration" to collect doodads to get 100%, everything feels very scripted and kind of soulless sometimes.
A lot of what you mentioned. I actually got pretty pissed at Last of Us even before I knew the guy was a zionist back when it first came out because it was so hyped and was being sold as something else entirely by the end of it. Though that tech doesn't fit what you are saying. The others are like that.
Honestly, the big one for me is most Metal Gear Solid. I liked 3 pretty well. But I HATED 2, 4 was okay. and I'm sorry I cannot get over how they treated Quiet. (was typing way to much for the spirit of this because of that before I deleted it). I see that the gameplay is interesting and stuff, but I just can't get over how they treat women in those games at this point. I was barely hanging on in the early ones cause at least a lot of the misogyny you had to go looking for it. I can say the same for most Kojima games tbh. Death Stranding looks interesting mechanically but...well it goes back to the grizzled white guy action. (Though I did like Witcher 3, more Blood and Wine, though. 1 and 2 are....something in the same vein as this one, though. 3 is a little better with it, but it does some "men writing women" type stuff.)
Ocarina of Time. Another one that kind of got over hyped for me. It's the curse of being one video game gen behind the older millennials, I stg. Cause when I played it, I understood it and got why it was important for other Zelda games, but holy hell it was not the transcendent experience that I was promised.
Most platformers in general, I can't get into. Which is normally fine cause I like games with story and most platformers didn't have that much...at one point. Thank god for mods or I would never of gotten through Hollow Knight or Silk Song. Holy hell, those games are brutal.
XCOM, Souls-like games and especially fighting games, I feel like a slow old man if I ever play one.
Also I completed both of the first two Mass Effects amd I wish I knew what people saw in them. I had this lesbian transphobe lib who was telling me they were so amazing she cri evertim!
They're basically popcorn, I think? Inoffensive to play but in one ear and out the other.
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Lastly are what I'll call "grizzled white guy action games" Uncharted, Red Dead, The Last of Us. They just feel too much like they're trying to be be a blockbuster for for guys that don't want to be made fun of for liking games rather than games.
The 7th generation was such a time and it's only become worse. You should disrespect "grizzled white guy action games" more tbh.
For me it's probably the Super Mario games, which on one hand probably seems like obvious contrarian bait and on the other hand Nintendo is the Disney of video games. I think it's the way they control, I dunno what the problem is but I've slammed my head into mario games my entire life and it just never clicks.
also gta was never good :>
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are there any non-mario platformers you enjoy? i love platformers but mario's always had some offputting physics, somehow feels too heavy and too slippery at the same time
I'm the world's biggest enjoyer of Castlevania, and I'm also a casual enjoyer of many Mega Man games, Kirby's Adventure is alright, & I have moderately-sized Sonic autism so there'd that too. Run and guns I'm split on, Intrusion 2 is so chill but Contra is super whatever.
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zelda
the map games, yk HOI4 EU4 Victoria those, I tried playing them before but I just don't like them. Zelda games and top down rpgs like it, dating games and visual novels, and battle royal games.
I don't like games that have too many choices or that have too much reading, because most games have a written in bias and illusion of choice, the political messaging and the choices of the story are all either way too vague to matter or have only 1 correct option, and it's all libbed up, it all puts me and my struggles in the background, hell because I'm a Muslim with [mental disorder] 90% of all games have someone like me be the villain or be shot.
I like stuff that I can mostly use muscle memory to get through, especially recently as my medical conditions worsen the games I play have a role of being visual white noise, racing games do this well for me, because most of them do not need audio to be played I can finish books or listen to albums or essays/audio books while playing them.
RTS Games. My cousin liked them growing up and had Starcraft and Warcraft, but I never jived with them. Something about micromanaging everything and having awareness of the map and what the enemy is doing at all times was too much for my smol brain. Now as I'm getting older I really can't keep up with them and don't dare try.
It's my favorite genre but I wish they'd try to implement quality of life changes for modern games. Like why not have an automated build order that starts as soon as the game starts you setup beforehand and can change at any time? Automated unit production? A fucking time out button so you can pause the game, queue up orders, then resume? How about options for autocasting in specific situations or prioritizing certain attacks that all go off when I A-move?
They're so needlessly complex that it killed the genre. It's like if you had to control each of your limbs individually in a 1st-person shooter. Can't have WASD movement, gotta have some fucked up 12QWASZX scheme to control forwards and backwards for each arm and leg.
Something about micromanaging everything and having awareness of the map and what the enemy is doing at all times was too much for my smol brain.
My little friend group of wannabe pro gamers each had our genres and as the RTS guy i felt exactly like you describe here watching anyone play an FPS competently. Being able to not only predict minor movements but also accurately aim looks like wizardry.
I'd like an RTS game that isn't about a trillion actions per second. Something slower and easier.
I'd recommend Dune: Spice Wars for this reason. It's a low micro game. It also has a bunch of different paths to victory that aren't entirely "wipe out enemy base". It also has good faction differentiation.
Dark Souls. Partly because fantasy worlds just don't generally do it for me, but also the split second timing and memorising attack patterns and responses. I get why people find that style of gameplay rewarding, but it feels like too much effort to me.
And Minecraft, or really any other game where the primary mechanic is resource harvesting and crafting. Satisfactory, subnautica, etc. Even No Man's Sky. I played enough Minecraft back when it was free that I get the appeal, but to me it just feels too much like work.
And that goes double for any game where the primary mechanic isn't crafting but it's had a system shoehorned in because of Minecraft's success. That's not gameplay, that's busywork.
but also the split second timing and memorising attack patterns and responses
To be fair that's mostly an issue on FromSoftware games from Dark Souls 3 onward. Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1 and 2 are pretty slow games and you don't need to play that way either, you could just play with a shield and defend most stuff just attacking when you feel like it or play a mage. But I totally get it, not everyone likes that style of gameplay.
Game where you have to remember the attack patterns of every single different type of enemy. Expedition 33 and Hades got close to the line, but things like Cuphead and Dark Souls just feel so boring because they feel like quicktime events without the prompts. I know identifying the pattern makes some people feel good, but it just feels tedious to me.
fighting games broadly, i just don't have the competitive spirit to really enjoy them outside of fucking around in the lab
Dark Souls. I've tried to love those games, but I can't get into them, I end up walking around wondering what the hell to do every time I try to play them lmao
Dark souls clicked for me when I watched a glitchless any% speedrun, because it made it seem achievable and gave some structure for how they can be played. The soulsborne games are now my hands down all-time favourites. I can definitely see why they don't appeal to everyone, though.
Oh I totally get it, first time I tried playing Dark Souls I was so damn lost. If you ever want to try it again you could use a walkthrough to see if it clicks with you then. I really love FromSoftware games so I'm super biased but I always love seeing people be able to get into them and have fun.
For me I was lost on the first Dark Souls because the Crestfallen guy you meet at Firelink Shrine tells you what to do, and for some reason I just didn't pay attention so I just got lost and had to look it up, but once you get what you have to do and understand that the game tries to tell you where you shouldn't be going by having strong enemies there like the cemetery in Firelink, it becomes much easier to navigate.
League, or mobas in general
people shit on them for having annoying fans (true) but i feel like you have to be somewhat smart to be good at those games, and part of why they got hate back then was RTS fans who were salty that you don’t need an absurdly high APS to git gud in comparison
I played League for more than a decade. It's more persevering than smart really, it does get to a point where you don't feel like you're getting any better if you don't start practicing the really boring stuff like controlling minion waves and such. It's just that it takes so long to get used to all the systems and characters that it looks daunting.
Also yeah league players are the fucking worse, same for CS and Valorant players, some of the most hateful people I've ever seen. Competitive team games just brings the worse of people for some reason.
Basically any game that is well-made but at the same time ridiculously difficult (looking at you, Silksong).
Cozy games: I understand the emotional need they fulfill, but they tend to feel saccharine to me.
Most visual novels (I love the Ace Attorney series though).
Those really old Roguelikes where everything is ASCII graphics and you have to memorize a million keyboard commands.
Most Roguelikes in general. There are a few I enjoy, but that's in spite of their Roguelike elements rather than because of them.
And for the inverse: I like the Pokemon games but can understand why people would find them off-putting from an animal exploitation/unfortunate implications perspective. It entirely comes down to whether the setting and creatures as presented are fantastical enough not to evoke discomfort, and that line's going to be different for everybody.
skyrim, witcher, yakuza, persona, assasin's creed
i really tried. they just dont do it for me
All games, generally. Im not such a troglodyte that I can't understand why others play games, but generally, nothing appeals to me.
I've tried countless times to get into Minecraft. Set up a server at home for my kids to play on several years ago. I still maintain it, but never got into it despite two dozen or more attempts to play. GTA, too. I played GTA:SA and SA:MP a ton. Probably more than everything else combined. But I can't get into four, five or online. I'll eventually buy the new one for my son but I might log ten minutes of gameplay. I can see gameplay footage on an advertisement and think 'yeah that looks cool' but still not find interest in playing it. I don't even have games on my phone.
Monster Hunter. It always feels like a grind fest with gorgeous makeup instead of a game focusing on hunting monsters.
Great series, but yeah, the endgame gets a bit ridiculous with the grinding. I would like to be able to fight the end bosses without having a 400 hour commitment, some of the drop rates near the end are absurd.
Oh totally. I love Monster Hunter, but I can get why people would hate it because you have to really be in it for the grind
Yeah and I just want to track and hunt monsters and make stuff out of their parts.
pretty much all 1st and 3rd person shooters, i get why people like them and why are they popular but everyone i have ever played have never clicked with me
I dunno if shooters really needed to go further than Half Life tbh...
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splatoon is my only exception to this, I played a lot of the second game.
But I just found the artstyle so damn ugly.
You could try looking into graphical mods for Minecraft, there's a shit ton of them, ranging from texture packs to shaders that completely change the look of the game.
Now for me it's less game series, more game genre. In my case it's survival games, I just get bored out of my mind playing them most of the time. There are exceptions that I love like Valheim, Minecraft, Hytale and Terraria, but almost every single other survival game I have tried just never clicks with me, and it sucks because some of them are beloved. My brother loves Don't Starve, but I was never able to get into it. I played The Forest all the way to the end, but it just bores me so much every single time, same thing for Rust and Ark. Hell even my love status for Minecraft is mostly nostalgia at this point, I get really bored playing it nowadays too.
Also, the first Witcher game is a fucking slog, I never finished it, always wanted to but at the same time I don't.
The Forest gives me racism heebie-jeebies, "degraded" horrific cannibals on a deserted island? Yikes. May be just me but I couldn't get past it.
I also get weird vibes from it but never paid much atention because I was mostly just playing for my friends.
Anything with card game mechanics.
The Witcher.
Geralt's voice is like nails on a chalkboard and I can't get through more than an hour of it.
I know it's translated from Polish, but the English-speaking voice actors know how to structure a sentence. When Geralt drops the "I" at the beginning of a sentence, it doesn't make it immersive, it's grammatically distracting. Cyberpunk did the same thing, and it ruined a bunch of the dialogue for me.
I don't see the problem in his pro-dropping tbh. I only dimly remember him saying "Heard something" or "Found something" or "Remembered something" or similar and I only think I'm remembering that because you said he drops the "I"s. Also that sort of first person pronoun dropping is pretty normal to me.
Is dropping those "I"s a polish language thing?
Yes. Polish is both a pronoun dropping language for subjects of sentences and also lacks articles. So it gets iffy to do 1:1 translation.
But as a personal pro-dropper (In that I do it regardless of language), I don't see the problem. [It] didn't bother me at all.
English elides the subject and sometimes even the object like that a lot in casual spoken contexts too. Not as much as the English dialogue in the Witcher and Cyberpunk does it, but it stands out extra hard because it's not something that's commonly done in media. Like the way people actually talk in real life is an ad hoc mess of dropping this bit or that bit and forgetting how the sentence you've started is even structured so it just kind of ends or transforms into something else, but when writing and even when writing dialogue writers tend to not do that and to edit sentences for clarity and coherence.
I think it worked in Cyberpunk, because it just added to the feel of the world having its own dialect and speech conventions that are comprehensible but a little bit off from what's familiar.
I agree as far as the English voice acting goes, but that’s why I played every game in the series in Polish with English subtitles.
I think minecraft is ugly, but I still like playing anyways. Its not really about having graphical mods, I just want to have a cute little pre-made ~~dollhouse~~ base builder game basically. I had a crisis about playing these games recently, because I seriously question what i'm getting out of it. In the sense that I have the full capacity to create / design whatever I want in person and I don't need to depend on building / crafting games.
However, apart of the appeal to grinding is that it's an enjoyable way to pass the time, scratches the itch for me. Its rewarding to gather the resources and build on limitations. If I had more structure, I would probably like minecraft even more.
Minecraft gives you unlimited options. You can wander around for hours looking for the best spot. You can challenge yourself and just build where you spawn. For some reasonc this unlimited aspect makes me feel lost and empty. I don't feel like returning, or as they call it the "2 week trend" or w/e
Likewise in some games where I have spent a long time building and return to the story (Dragon quest builders 2) I often don't feel like completing it, or doing any freestyle builds.
Creative mode for some reason is very boring to me, in any instance of these games. I want the challenge, I want structure, a reason to keep engaging. I think playing with others and building towards a goal would work just as well, which may be the actual secret appeal to these games (for me.)
I got the itch Minecraft supposedly gives from Terraria which is far more structured/narratively coherent.
If you enjoy something, you enjoy it! Unless you're not having fun there's no need to have a crisis about it heh
definitely minecraft. like i get it, it's somewhat cool, but i don't like voxels. just not my cup of grains.
